7 POWERS AND STRATEGIES
Interviewers: editorial collective of Les rt?voltes logiquesJean Borreil, Genevieve Fraisse, Jacques Ranciere, Pierre
Saint-Germain, Michel Souletie, Patrick Vauday, Patrice
Vermeren.
Your book Madness and Civilisation concludes by
exposing the illusory nature of Pinel's 'liberation' of the
insane. The Birth of the Clinic starts by pouring scorn
on medical humanisms and 'acephalous phenomenologies of understanding'. Yet prevailing Leftist and
post-Leftist opinion has been happy to regard 'internment' as encapsulating the efficacy and the oppressive
nature of power, and turned Michel Foucault into a sort
of new Pinel announcing the joyous liberation of desire
and the marginal.
This same theme of internment is used to reduce the
analysis of mechanisms of domination to the schema of
a purely external relation between power and the plebs,
positing the equation: Classical Reason/Internment =
Marxism/the Gulag.
Isn't it an inversion of your arguments to make the
critique of 'internment' serve as a neo-liberal or neopopulist slogan?
I am indeed worried by a certain use that is made of the
Gulag- Internment parallel. A certain use which consists in
saying, 'Everyone has their own Gulag, the Gulag is here at
our door, in our cities, our hospitals, our prisons, it's here in
our heads'. I fear that under the pretext of 'systematic
denunciation' a sort of open-ended eclecticism will be
installed which will serve as a cover for all sorts of manoeuvres. With immense indignation, with a great philanthropic sigh, we embrace the whole world's political
persecutions, and so make it possible for the PCF to take
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135
part in a meeting where Plioutch is speaking. Which enables
the said communist party to produce three parallel lines of
argument: (i) From the wings: 'Here we all are together, all
terribly concerned. The USSR has the same problems as
every country in the world, neither better nor worse, and
vice versa. So let's share our struggle, that is divide it up
between us'. (ii) To the partners in the electoral alliance:
'Look what an independent line we too are taking towards
the USSR. We are denouncing the Gulag just as you are, so
leave us in peace'. (iii) Inside the Party: 'Look how skilful
we are at evading the problem of the Soviet Gulag by
dissolving it in the troubled waters of political imprisonment
in general'.
It seems to me that one must make a distinction between
the Gulag institution and the Gulag question. Like all
political technologies, the Gulag institution has its history,
its transformations and transpositions, its functions and
effects. The internment practiced in the Classical age forms
in all likelihood a part of its archaeology. The Gulag
question, on the other hand, involves a political choice.
There are those who pose it and those who don't. To pose it
means four things:
(a) Refusing to question the Gulag on the basis of the
texts of Marx or Lenin or to ask oneself how, through what
error, deviation, misunderstanding or distortion of speculation or practice, their theory could have been betrayed to
such a degree. On the contrary, it means questioning all
these theoretical texts, however old, from the standpoint of
the reality of the Gulag. Rather than of searching in those
texts for condemnation in advance of the Gulag, it is a
matter of asking what in those texts could have made the
Gulag possible, what might even now continue to justify it,
and what makes it intolerable truth still accepted today. The
Gulag question must be posed not in terms of error
(reduction of the problem to one of theory), but in terms of
reality.
(b) Refusing to restrict one's questioning to the level of
causes. If one begins by asking for the 'cause' of the Gulag
(Russia's retarded development, the transformation of the
party into a bureaucracy, the specific economic difficulties of
the USSR), one makes the Gulag appear as a sort of disease
a
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or abscess, an infection, degeneration or involution. This is
to think of the Gulag only negatively, as an obstacle to be
removed, a dysfunctioning to be rectified- a maternity illness of the country which is painfully giving birth to socialism.
The Gulag question has to be posed in positive terms. The
problem of causes must not be dissociated from that of
function: what use is the Gulag, what functions does it
assure, in what strategies is it integrated? The Gulag should
be analysed as a politico-economic operator in a socialist
state. We must avoid all historicist reductionism. The Gulag
is not a residue or a sequel of the past: it is a positive
present.
(c) Refusing to adopt for the critique of the Gulag a law or
principle of selection internal to our own discourse or
dream. By this I mean giving up the politics of inverted
commas, not attempting to evade the problem by putting
inverted commas, whether damning or ironic, round Soviet
socialism in order to protect the good, true socialism - with
no inverted commas- which alone can provide a legitimate
standpoint for a politically valid critique of the Gulag.
Actually the only socialism which deserves these scornful
scare-quotes is the one which leads the dreamy life of
ideality in our heads. We must open our eyes on the
contrary to what enables people there, on the spot, to resist
the Gulag, what makes it intolerable for them, and what can
give the people of the anti-Gulag the courage to stand up
and die in order to be able to utter a word or a poem. We
must discover what makes Mikhail Stern say '1 will not give
in'. We must find out too how those 'almost illiterate' men
and women gathered together (under what threats?) to
accuse him found the strength to publicly exonerate him.
We should listen to these people, not to our century-old
little love song for 'socialism'. What is it that sustains them,
what gives them their energy, what is the force at work in
their resistance, what makes them stand and fight? And
above all let us not ask them if they are really, still and
despite everything, 'communists', as if that were the condition for our consenting to listen to them. I The leverage
against the Gulag is not in our heads, but in their bodies,
their energy, what they say, think and do.
(d) Rejecting the universalising dissolution of the problem
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137
into the "denunciation' of every possible form of internment.
The Gulag is not a question to be posed for any and every
country. It has to be posed for every socialist country, insofar as none of these since 1917 has managed to function
without a more-or-Iess developed Gulag system.
To sum up, it seems to me that we must insist on the
specificity of the Gulag question against all theoretical
reductionisms (which make the Gulag an error already to be
read in the texts), against all historicist reductionisms
(which make the Gulag a conjunctural effect which can be
isolated in terms of its causes), against all utopian dissociations (which would set it, with "pseudo-socialism', in
opposition to socialism "itself'), against all universalising
dissolutions into the general form of internment. These
operations all serve the same role (and they are none too
many for the accomplishment of so difficult a task): to
preserve the currency among us of a Leftist discourse whose
organising principles remain unchanged. It seems to me that
Glucksmann's analysis escapes all these so readily practiced
forms of reduction. 2
This much having been said regarding the specificity of
the Gulag question, two problems remain: (i) How to relate
concretely, both in analysis and in practice, the critique of
the technologies of normalisation which derive historically
from Classical internment with the struggle against the
historically growing threat posed by the Soviet Gulag? What
should the priorities be? What organic links ought we to
establish between the two tasks? (ii) The other problem,
which is linked with the preceding one (the answer to the
second conditioning in part that to the first), concerns the
existence of a 'plebs', the permanent, ever silent target for
apparatuses of power.
To the former question it seems to me impossible at
present to offer any categorical, individual response. We
have to try and elaborate one via the political conjunctures
which we are now traversing. To the second question
however it seems to me that one can at least give the outline
of an answer. No doubt it would be mistaken to conceive the
plebs as the permanent ground of history, the final objective
of all subjections, the ever smouldering centre of all revolts.
The plebs is no doubt not a real sociological entity. But
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there is indeed always something in the social body, in
classes, groups and individuals themselves which in some
sense escapes relations of power, something which is by no
means a more or less docile or reactive primal matter, but
rather a centrifugal movement, an inverse energy, a discharge. There is certainly no such thing as 'the' plebs; rather
there is, as it were, a certain plebeian quality or aspect ('de
la' plebe). There is plebs in bodies, in souls, in individuals,
in the proletariat, in the bourgeoisie, but everywhere in a
diversity of forms and extensions, of energies and irreducibilities. This measure of plebs is not so much what
stands outside relations of power as their limit, their underside, their counter-stroke, that which responds to every
advance of power by a movement of disengagement. Hence
it forms the motivation for every new development of
networks of power. The reduction of the plebs can be
achieved in three ways, either by its effective subjection, or
by its utilisation as a plebs (as in the example of criminality
in the nineteenth century), or alternatively by its stabilising
itself through a strategy of resistance. This point of view of
the plebs, the point of view of the underside and limit of
power, is thus indispensable for an analysis of its apparatuses (dispositlfs); this is the starting point for understanding its functioning and developments. I don't think this can
be confused in any way with a neo-populism that substantialises the plebs as an entity, or a neo-liberalism that
sanctifies its basic rights.
The question of the exercise of power tends to be conceptualised today in terms of love (of the master) or
desire (of the masses for fascism). Is it possible to
establish the genealogy of this form of subjectivisation?
And is it possible to establish the forms of consent, the
'reasons for obedience' whose functioning it serves to
travesty? For some, the domain of sex is where the
ineluctability of the master is established; for others, it
is the source of the most radical of all subversions.
Power is thus represented as interdict, with law as its
form and sex as its content. Is this device for legitimating
two con tradictory discourses tied to the historical
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139
'accident' of the Freudian discovery, or does it denote a
specific function of sexuality in the economy of power?
It doesn't seem to me that one can deal with both of these
questions-love of the master and desire of the masses for
fascism-in the same way. It is true that in each case one
finds a certain 'subjectivisation' of power relations, but this
is not produced in the same way in the two cases.
In the affirmation of the desire of the masses for fascism,
what is troubling is that an affirmation covers up for the lack
of any precise historical analysis. In this I see above all the
effect of a general complicity in the refusal to decipher what
fascism really was (a refusal that manifests itself either in
generalisation - fascism is everywhere, above all in our
heads- or in Marxist schematisation). The non-analysis of
fascism is one of the important political facts of the past
thirty years. It enables fascism to be used as a floating
signifier, whose function is essentially that of denunciation.
The procedures of every form of power are suspected of
being fascist, just as the masses are in their desires. There
lies beneath the affirmation of the desire of the masses for
fascism a historical problem which we have yet to secure the
means of resolving.
The notion of 'love of the master' poses other problems,
I think. It is a certain way of not posing the problem of
power, or rather of posing it in such a way that it cannot
be analysed. This is due to the insubstantiality of the
notion of the master, an empty form haunted only by the
various phantoms of the master and his slave, the master
and his disciple, the master and his workman, the master
who pronounces law and speaks the truth, the master who
censors and forbids. The key point is that to this reduction
of power to the figure of the master there is linked another
reduction, that of procedures of power to the law of
prohibition. This reduction of power to law has three main
roles: (i) It underwrites a schema of power which is
homogeneous for every level and domain - family or State,
relations of education or production. (ii) It enables power
never to be thought of in other than negative terms: refusal,
limitation, obstruction, censorship. Power is what says no.
And the challenging of power as thus conceived can appear
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only as transgression. (iii) It allows the fundamental
operation of power to be thought of as that of a speech-act:
enunciation of law, discourse of prohibition. The manifestation of power takes on the pure form of 'Thou shalt not'.
Such a conception has a certain number of epistemological
advantages because of the possibility of linking it with an
ethnology centred on the analysis of the great kinshipprohibitions and with a psychoanalysis centred on the
mechanisms of repression. Thus one single and identical
'formula' of power (the interdict) comes to be applied to all
forms of society and all levels of subjection. And so through
treating power as the instance of negation one is led to a
double 'subjectivisation'. In the aspect of its exercise, power
is conceived as a sort of great absolute Subject which
pronounces the interdict (no matter whether this Subject is
taken as real, imaginary, or purely juridical): the Sovereignty of the Father, the Monarch or the general will. In
the aspect of subjection to power, there is an equal tendency
to 'subjectivise' it by specifying the point at which the
interdict is accepted, the point where one says yes or no to
power. This is how, in order to account for the exercise of
Sovereignty, there is assumed either a renunciation of
natural rights, a Social Contract, or a love of the master. It
seems to me that the problem is always posed in the same
terms, from the edifice constructed by the classical jurists
down to current conceptions: an essentially negative power,
presupposing on the one hand a sovereign whose role is to
forbid and on the other a subject who must somehow
effectively say yes to this prohibition. The contemporary
analysis of power in terms of libido is still articulated by this
old juridical conception.
Why has this kind of analysis enjoyed a centuries-old
privilege? Why is power so invariably interpreted in the
purely negative terms of law and prohibition? Why is power
immediately represented as a system of law? It will be said
no doubt that law (droit) in Western societies has always
served as a mask for power. This explanation does not seem
wholly adequate. Law was an effective instrument for the
constitution of monarchical forms of power in Europe, and
political thought was ordered for centuries around the
problem of Sovereignty and its rights. Moreover, law,
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141
particularly in the eighteenth century, was a weapon of the
struggle against the same monarchical power which had
initially made use of it to impose itself. Finally, law was the
principal mode of representation of power (and representation should not be understood here as a screen or an
illusion, but as a real mode of action).
Law is neither the truth of power nor its alibi. It is an
instrument of power which is at once complex and partial.
The form of law with its effects of prohibition needs to be
resituated among a number of other, non-juridical mechanisms. Thus the penal system should not be analysed
purely and simply as an apparatus of prohibition and
repression of one class by another, nor as an alibi for the
lawless violence of the ruling class. The penal system makes
possible a mode of political and economic management
which exploits the difference between legality and illegalities. The same holds true for sexuality: prohibition is
certainly not the principal form of the investment of
sexuality by power.
Your analysis of the techniques of power opposes itself
to discourses about love of the master or desire for
fascism. But doesn't it also allow room for them by
absolutising power, assuming it as always already there,
an enduring entity which confronts the equally enduring
guerilla warfare of the masses- and thus letting slip the
question: whom and what does power serve? Isn't
there an underlying duplicity between this political
anatomy and Marxism: the class struggle is rejected as
the ratio for the exercise of power, yet preserved in the
last analysis as that which guarantees the intelligibility
of techniques for the dressage of body and mind (the
production of a labour force suitable for the tasks
assigned to it by capitalist exploitation, and so forth)?
It seems to me that power is 'always already there', that one
is never 'outside' it, that there are no 'margins' for those
who break with the system to gambol in. But this does not
entail the necessity of accepting an inescapable form of
domination or an absolute privilege on the side of the law.
To say that one can never be 'outside' power does not mean
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that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter
what.
I would suggest rather (but these are hypotheses which
will need exploring): (i) that power is co-extensive with the
social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between
the meshes of its network; (ii) that relations of power are
interwoven with other kinds of relations (production, kinship, family, sexuality) for which they play at once a
conditioning and a conditioned role; (iii) that these relations
don't take the sole form of prohibition and punishment, but
are of multiple forms; (iv) that their interconnections
delineate general conditions of domination, and this
domination is organised into a more-or-Iess coherent and
unitary strategic form; that dispersed, heteromorphous,
localised procedures of power are adapated, re-inforced and
transformed by these global strategies, all this being accompanied by numerous phenomena of inertia, displacement and resistance; hence one should not assume a massive
and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with
'dominators' on one side and 'dominated' on the other, but
rather a multiform production of relations of domination
which are partially susceptible of integration into overall
strategies; (v) that power relations do indeed 'serve', but
not at all because they are 'in the service of' an economic
interest taken as primary, rather because they are capable of
being utilised in strategies; (vi) that there are no relations
of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real
and effective because they are formed right at the point
where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power
does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is it
inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of
power. It exists all the more by being in the same place as
power; hence, like power, resistance is multiple and can be
integrated in global strategies.
Thus it is possible for class struggle not to be the 'ratio for
the exercise of power', yet still be the 'guarantee of intelligibility' for certain grand strategies.
Can the analysis of the guerilla struggle between the
masses and power avoid the reformist thought which
turns revolt into the signal that prompts a new policy of
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143
adaptation from above, or the trap leading to some new
form of domination? Can the act of refusal be thought
outside the dilemma of reformism or 'angelism '?3 Your
discussion with Deleuze4 assigned to theory the function
of a tool-kit for the use of new political subjects, basing
this idea on experiments like the Prisons Information
Group (GIP). Now that the traditional political parties
have reestablished their hegemony over the Left, can
one use the toolkit as something other than an instrument for research into the past?
I t is necessary to make a distinction between critique of
reformism as a political practice and the critique of a
political practice on the grounds that it may give rise to a
reform. This latter form of critique is frequent in left-wing
groups and its employment is part of the mechanisms of
micro-terrorism by which they have often operated. It
amounts to saying, 'Beware: however ideally radical your
intentions may be, your action is so localised and your
objectives so isolated that at this particular spot the
adversary will be able to handle the situation, to yield if
necessary without in any way compromising his global
position; even better, this will allow him to locate the sites
of necessary transformation; and so you will have been
recuperated'. The anathema is pronounced. Now it seems to
me that this critique rests on two errors:
First, there is a misunderstanding of the strategic form
that processes of struggle take. If one accepts that the form
- both general and concrete- of struggle is contradiction,
then clearly everything which allows the contradiction to be
localised or narrowed down will be seen as a brake or a
blockage. But the problem is precisely as to whether the
logic of contradiction can actually serve as a principle of
intelligibility and rule of action in political struggle. This
touches on a momentous political question: how is it that
since the nineteenth century the specific problems of
struggle and the strategy of struggle have tended so constantly to be dissolved into the meagre logic of contradiction? There are a whole series of reasons for this that will
need to be analysed some day. In any case, one must try to
think struggle and its forms, objectives, means and pro-
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cesses in terms of a logic free of the sterilising constraints of
the dialectic. In order to think the social bond, 'bourgeois'
political thought of the eighteenth century adopted the
juridical form of the contract. In order to think struggle, the
'revolutionary' thought of the nineteenth century adopted
the logical form of contradiction. The latter, no doubt, is no
more valid than the former. In contrast, the great States of
the nineteenth century adopted a strategic mode of thought,
while the revolutionary struggles conceived their strategy
only in a very conjunctural manner, endeavouring at the
same time always to inscribe it within the horizon of contradiction.
The phobia of the adversary's reformist riposte is also
linked with second error. This is the privilege accorded to
what is solemnly termed the 'theory' of the weakest link. A
local attack is considered to have sense and legitimacy only
when directed at the element which, if broken, will allow
the total breach of the chain. That is, it must be a local
action but one which, through the choice of its site, will act
radically on the whole. Here again we should ask why this
thesis has had such success in the twentieth century, and
why it has been erected into a theory. Certainly it rendered
thinkable the event that Marxism had failed to foresee: the
revolution in Russia. But in general it must be recognised
that we are dealing here not with a dialectical, but a
strategic proposition-and a very elementary one at that. It
provided the acceptable minimum of strategy for a mode of
thinking ruled by the dialectic, and has remained closely
linked to dialectic because it expressed the possibility for a
local situation to count as the contradiction of the whole.
Hence the solemnity with which this 'Leninist' thesis was
erected into a 'theory' - one which is barely on a level with
the preliminary training given to a sub-lieutenant in the
reserves. And it's in the name of this thesis that every local
action is terrorised with the following dilemma: either you
attack on a local level, but you must be sure that it's at the
weakest link, the one whose breakage will demolish the
whole structure; or else, since the whole structure fails to
collapse, the link wasn't the weakest one, the adversary
needed only to re-organise his front, and a reform has
reabsorbed your attack.
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145
It seems to me that this whole intimidation with the bogy
of reform is linked to the lack of a strategic analysis
appropriate to political struggle, to struggles in the field of
political power. The role for theory today seems to me to be
just this: not to formulate the global systematic theory which
holds everything in place, but to analyse the specificity of
mechanisms of power, to locate the connections and
extensions, to build little by little a strategic knowledge
(savoir). If 'the traditional parties have re-established their
hegemony over the Left', and over the diverse forms of
struggle which had not originally been under their control,
one reason among many for this was that only a profoundly
inadequate logic was available to these struggles for the
analysis of their unfolding and their effects.
The notion of theory as a tookit means: (i) The theory to
be constructed is not a system but an instrument, a logic of
the specificity of power relations and the struggles around
them; (ii) That this investigation can only be carried out step
by step on the basis of reflection (which will necessarily be
historical in some of its aspects) on given situations.
These questions were put to me in writing. The replies were
also given in writing, but in an improvised fashion, with
hardly any alteration of the first draft. This was not through
any faith in the virtues of spontaneity, but so as to leave the
propositions put forward their problematic, intentionally
uncertain character. What I have said here is not 'what I
think', but often rather what I wonder whether one couldn't
think. 1M. F.]
Notes
1 It should be noted that one doesn't find in France as in other countries
the regular publication of the writings of the Soviet counter-culture.
It's these rather than the texts of Marx which should serve here as the
material for our reflection.
2 A. Glucksmann, La Cuisiniere et Ie Mangeur d'Hommes (Editions du
Seuil, Paris, 1975).
3 G. Lardreau and C. Jambet, L'Ange ('The Angel') (Grasset, Paris,
1976), one of the texts of the 'nouveaux philosophes' circle; it advocates
a form of sublime pessimism in political matters.
4 'Les intellectuels et Ie pouvoir', L'Are 49 (1972), translated in Telos 16
(1973) and in D. F. Bouchard (ed), Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice (Cornell University Press, 1976).